Joshua Kotin's book offers a smart and sophisticated account of one mode of modern utopian thought and practice. “Utopias of One” are texts that create “isolated and isolating, singular and specific” (2) perfect worlds. These utopias do not offer models to imitate; they are exclusive.

Kotin argues that these efforts to create tightly controlled zones of personal independence were responses to the failures of “modernity's two most ambitious attempts to harmonize individual and collective interests: liberalism and communism” (2). Accordingly, the book presents a compelling series of mainly American and Soviet examples: Henry David Thoreau, W.E.B. Du Bois, Osip and Nadezhda Mandel΄shtam, Anna Akhmatova, Wallace Stevens, Ezra Pound, and J. H. Prynne. I found it revelatory to think, for instance, about Du Bois's rejection of the United States and his embrace of the Communist Party (and the Soviet Union) in relation to Osip Mandel΄shtam's rejection of the Soviet Union (or at least the Stalinist version of it) through his famous performance of an anti-Stalin poem, one that eventually led to his death.

Kotin focuses on memoirs and poems because, as he says, they “create utopias,” where “stories and novels depict utopias” (11). One need not accept that distinction in order to appreciate Kotin's interest in texts that make things happen, at least (but not necessarily only) for the author. For instance, Mandel΄shtam's performance of his anti-Stalin poem was also an effective act: he insulted Stalin and brought the violence of the state apparatus down upon himself. In so doing, he also created a collective of witnesses who each would have to decide whether to keep the secret of having heard the poem and thus enter into complicity with Mandel΄shtam, or decide to betray him (as at least one person must have done). Even as he affected other people and created witnesses (including his wife Nadezhda, who brilliantly recorded all these events in her memoirs, also analyzed by Kotin), Mandel΄shtam's exercise of independence remained his alone. It was an act of extreme isolation.

In another register, Kotin shows how writing Walden was a way for Thoreau to heighten his modes of attention and perception, indeed to make a “lived and perfect world.” Although Walden seems to invite imitation, Kotin argues that such imitations not only fail to heed Thoreau's warnings against it, but in any case do not succeed because his virtuosic performance in Walden is too singular and too precisely located for there to be any model there to copy. But, given just how many people Thoreau nonetheless inspired, I wonder if there is also something utopian about actively promoting imitations that inevitably fail. Such a project produces a collectivity of inaccurate imitators, each also singular not in their pursuit of a grandiose project, but in the specific way they failed to match the model. Maybe Thoreau, as Whitman put it, is sending “vivas to those to have fail'd” and who will fail. I guess that would be a different utopia.

Kotin is concerned with poetry and memoir as expressions or instances of what he sees as a “transhistorical” desire for freedom. “Every utopia of one is a negative index of oppression, and a positive index of artistic vision and ingenuity” (87). In their singularity, in their dissolution or existing communities, these utopias dramatize the absence (or impossibility) of such freedom in the world in which they occur. Freedom is obviously a key concept for Kotin here, and he draws on Isaiah Berlin and Hannah Arendt to distinguish between negative liberty (the freedom from interference) and positive freedom (a kind of self-mastery or ability to exercise one's free will) in showing how each of his figures tries to find a zone where the contradictions between these modes of freedom can be temporarily resolved in one way or another.

I do not find this (liberal, humanist) set of concerns politically compelling, which was only a problem when Kotin masks his liberalism in apparently neutral observations about “us” as a kind of general reader. For instance, he suggests that Du Bois's refusal to justify his turn to the Communist Party in his Autobiography is a rejection of his readers. But, which readers? Whatever we think about the Party, Du Bois's optimism about communism and the Soviet Union is only “hermetic” from a liberal or anticommunist point of view. From a communist or black radical perspective, it can be seen as an act of solidarity with millions of other communists around the world.

Kotin's argument might be seen as a liberal and non-Marxist rewriting of the one that Theodor Adorno makes (in Aesthetic Theory) for modernist aesthetic autonomy as an effort to create “windowless monads,” which “in their very hermetic closure . . . represent what lies outside themselves.” For Adorno, this closure is the best way to represent a world that creates monadic subjectivities. Aesthetic autonomy is thus not only an instrument of personal autonomy (as Kotin sees it), but is an expression of the collective experience of monadic isolation itself. Perhaps this is one reason why Kotin's utopias of one, for all their anti-sociality, are quite popular: they speak eloquently to a collectivity of readers also suffering under similar circumstances and entertaining similar utopian desires. As New Order once put it, “On a thousand islands in the sea / I see a thousand people just like me.”